Ah, Independence Day: life, liberty, and the pursuit of the written word. I know I didn’t actually read 233 articles today (one for each year since the Declaration), but I gave it my best shot….
- “He blanked Joseph Jackson from his life and excised him from his face, but could not forget his father’s exhortation to be ‘a winner, not a loser.‘ ” Where else but The Economist would you expect to find such an pithy, opinionated, and worthwhile obituary of Michael Jackson? No punches pulled here, nor any failure to acknowledge his “real, hard-won achievements.” By putting this together with Bob Herbert in Saturday’s NYT, methinks I am done with Michael for a few months. Or years.
- “It’s not just the statisticians who wonder whether our heroes achieve records more often than coins. Psychologists, and, increasingly, economists, also puzzle over the seemingly discrete worlds of chance and perception.” In The Triumph of the Random in Friday’s WSJ, Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech reminds us that “Extraordinary events, both good and bad, can happen without extraordinary causes, and so it is best to always remember the other factor that is always present—the factor of chance.” (By, er, chance, a couple of hours later I began reading the typescript of a friend’s next book – which at one point moves the analysis of cause-and-effect from the realms of mathematics and probability into that of neuroscience. Yes, I had time to read more than newspapers and magazines!)
“Swedes believe that consensus is the best way to take long-term decisions that all can live with.” Well, that explains a lot about me, I guess, if you go for nature over nurture. The Economist again, this time in Charlemagne’s column, Those exceptional Swedes. Oh, and elsewhere, the sensible Swedes who run Ikea get props for suspending investment in Russia due to, ahem, the “unpredictable character of administrative procedures” – read graft and corruption. As Charlemagne pseudonymously puts it, “Sweden, in short, is an exceptional place.”